Un-blocking WordPress.com in China
WordPress.com is localizing its software. This means that the WordPress.com user interface will now be available in many languages, including both traditional and simplified Chinese.
I think this is a good opportunity for WordPress.com to work towards getting un-blocked in China. WordPress.com could accomplish this by censoring what can be written by bloggers writing in simplified Chinese from mainland China much in the same way that Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) restricts the content of posts and comments of users registered with that service in mainland China.
The Chinese government seems okay with the arrangement Microsoft has made, so WordPress.com might find it fruitful to follow their model. Other examples include Google.com and Google.cn. The latter is a censored mainland Chinese version. The former is the international version of Google and at the time of writing seems uncensored, eg., the first ten results of a search for “Tiananmen Square” are almost all related to the events of 1989. Both are available in China.
If Windows Live Spaces and Google are examples of the kind of compromise that is acceptable to the Chinese government, then WordPress.com could implement a similar kind of censorship for mainland China only. In no way would this censor readers in China from reading posts in any language on WordPress.com, including Chinese. It would only restrict bloggers registered as being mainland Chinese and writing in simplified Chinese from writing posts and comments containing sensitive keywords in Chinese.
To read more of my thoughts on this see here, here and here. To read others who support this idea see here and here.
Tags WordPress, China, GFW, Censorship, Net Nanny, Blogging
August 11, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Interesting
http://uvgarden.blogspot.com
August 13, 2006 at 4:32 am
Honestly I wouldn’t even know who to talk to if we were going to do this.
October 16, 2006 at 7:29 am
http://english.gov.cn/
I think that would be a start
August 19, 2007 at 7:47 pm
[...] questions. As long as we’re on the topic I might as well plug an idea to solve their China censorship problem while they are considering how to solve their Turkey [...]
August 26, 2007 at 7:59 am
ok u wrote this a year ago n here i am, worrying about the end of my internet life the moment i love to china (beijing). can you pls tell me if wordpress is really blocked in china still?
August 26, 2007 at 10:15 am
I don’t live in China anymore, but it was still blocked when I left a month ago. I doubt it has become unblocked since. Anyway, there are a number of workarounds to the block, the quickest being a DNS redirect. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means. Follow the link and read up on it if you want. Then follow this link for instructions on how to get it to work. Tor is another solution, and is much more versatile too, but unfortunately it is agonizingly slow.